


Lilac Wine

by Inaccessible Rail (strangetales)



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, archive warnings: emma swan deserves the world, archive warnings: verbose neverland one-shot, archive warnings: when kissing isn't just kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-17 08:07:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9312920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangetales/pseuds/Inaccessible%20Rail
Summary: She takes a sip anyway. She kisses him anyway. His lips, teeth, and tongue all taste of it. When she breathes between their kiss she inhales the harsh burn of it, and her head spins but all she can do is demand more; curl her fingers around the collar of his jacket tighter, tighter.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AbaddonsLittleWItch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AbaddonsLittleWItch/gifts).



> My own contribution to the overwhelming (and necessary) collection of Neverland-inspired fic. For Kat and her return to school. You got this! xo

“When I think more than I want to think / I do things I never should do / I drink much more than I ought to drink / Because it brings me back you / Lilac wine is sweet and heady, like my love / Lilac wine, I feel unsteady, like my love.” -- “Lilac Wine,” Nina Simone

...

When Emma was young, she was desperate to be special. If she stood out, the possibility was greater that someone would want to keep her. That a teacher or a babysitter or a social worker would see how unusually talented or smart she was, and a nice couple would suddenly decide that it would be in their own best interest to take her home. Trouble was, of course, that no one really _wanted_ to see an orphan. She was drowning in her clothes most of the time, and regardless of her plans, she didn’t necessarily _want_ people to see her. She usually let her long, thick hair cover her face. She didn’t make eye contact with her teachers and peers, and even when she wanted to raise her hand in class, there was that little niggling _something_ holding her back. A voice inside her head that told her no one wanted to hear what she had to say anyway.

Despite her nervousness, she did try for a while. Quiet, isolating talents that wouldn’t necessarily require her to share them at first. _Maybe_ , she would think, _maybe if I practice a lot, by the time I’ve gotten better, I won’t be afraid to show them_. So she tried her hand at drawing, found whatever paper and writing implements she could (some of them she would even steal from her classroom at school), and she would begin. A soccer ball, the starving cat that wandered around her neighborhood, the fake bowl of fruit that sat in the middle of the living room at the foster home. Anything and everything, she _tried_. She kept all of her drawings in a folder in her desk marked “TOP SECRET,” underlined _three whole times_ , and then circled with a yellow highlighter, just to be safe.

And then, one day, the worst happened. A boy whose name she would fail to remember as an adult, but whose face would still appear in the occasional nightmare, discovered her secret, pulled her attempts at “special” from their hiding place. He flat-out _ignored_ the “TOP SECRET” printed across the front, the _three_ lines beneath it. And he looked, and then he laughed, and then he showed everyone else. And she knew she couldn’t bear it, not again, so away they went, into the garbage with everything else. With the short story she tried writing, the rhyming poetry that sounded eerily like Dr. Seuss and she decided right then and there that being special wasn’t worth it.

And then she punched him in the nose.

... 

He probably hadn’t meant for anyone to find it, but he had left it exposed in the middle of the table, practically begging to be found. There’s standard fare, captain’s logs, temperature and visibility and any number of nautical details that she couldn’t make heads or tails of. But there were also sketches, some spanning the length of two pages, others sequestered away in the corners of a single page; small and insignificant. Some completed, others not. Half of a face, a clenched fist. The shape of a whale or shark fin, breaching a tempestuous wave.

 _Who would have thought?_ Captain Hook is a tortured artist. She smirks to herself, pushes away the guilty feeling that maybe she shouldn’t be looking at this, maybe it’s _private_. She keeps a fair amount of her own secrets, after all, knows what it’s like to keep certain parts of yourself hidden away from prying eyes. It makes a certain kind of sense; the dramatic flair, the broody disposition. The eyeliner. Whatever the reality, there’s an attention to detail within those pages that she can’t shake. A noticeable talent that a part of her envies; the small, insecure orphan inside of her yearning for _talent_ , one thing, anything, that would make her stand out from a crowd of kids just as lonely and desperate as she was.

She starts taking notice of the world and people around her as an artist would. _As he might._ The island is large and imposing, but from a distance it’s a formless mass, made of dark greens and blues, swirling in and out of each other like a whirlwind. When the water crashes against the shore it’s paler, somehow, the colors less indistinct. She can see the pebbles, shells, and seagrass drifting along the sand beneath the shallow waves.

The way her father looks at her mother. The way Gold looks at all of them, as if they were merely pawns to be moved on a board that no one else can see. The way Regina seems to inspect her rather than simply _look_ , knowing that it’s Emma but seeing Henry instead, like she were just an empty, used up vessel that’s already served its purpose. And maybe she is. Maybe that’s her talent; a receptacle with no substance of her own, her only purpose to exist as a means to another’s end; for Regina’s son, the Savior’s magic, her parent’s dreams. _Maybe, maybe, maybe._

...

His eyes are blue but sometimes they’re not. And blue is just… not adequate. It’s not enough, it would be like saying Neverland from the prow of his ship was black. And it’s not black; it’s night, and _jungle_ , and the deepest ocean she’s ever seen. It’s textures and sounds, and his eyes are _not blue_. She _hates_ that they’re not blue.

He’s taller than she is, but strangely, she never feels as if he’s towering over her. He holds himself with a certain kind of confidence that she admires; for all her blustering these last few days, it feels like she’s moments away from crumbling. But she suspects, and this is when the blue of his eyes turns darker, and maybe slightly green, that if she _were_ to fumble under the weight of all this, he would lean towards her (maybe just a bit) so she could lift herself back up.

In the moments before she briefly fumbles, grabs the lapels of that _stupid_ coat and _makes him lean_ , she notices an absolutely abhorrent sheen of sweat across his brow and cheeks. It’s been there for days, this island wins first prize in overall humidity, and everyone has been slightly sweaty since they arrived, but it plays differently along the planes of _his_ face. And why, good God, _why_ , can’t sweat, just be _sweat_? Only it’s not, because it barely shines, but it emphasizes a blush in his cheeks that she keeps noticing; this flushing pink that she can’t stop looking at.

The liquor lingers on her tongue from his kiss. She's had expensive booze before, the kind that you can barely feel when it slides down your throat. It lands so smoothly in your stomach that you barely notice when the room starts to spin. The unholy concoction in Hook’s flask could barely be called rum. It burns before you even take a sip, the fumes of it invading your senses, warning you off.

She takes a sip anyway. She kisses him anyway. His lips, teeth, and tongue all taste of it. When she breathes between their kiss she inhales the harsh burn of it, and her head spins but all she can do is demand more; curl her fingers around the collar of his jacket tighter, tighter.

Time seems to move slower, and there’s a brief moment in the midst of this sweet, warm, boozy torture that she wonders whether or not Pan has played a trick on them. If this island has more in the way of deception than they had realized, if he’s been sent by Pan to distract her; if there’s an enormous, ticking clock somewhere under their feet and the hands have been rigged to move slower. She can tell he’s surprised at first, which is a treat in and of itself, but then she feels his chest expand with renewed vigor against her own, and that’s when the doubt trickles in.

The worry that it’s some kind of trick to prevent her from rescuing Henry, _But there’s just no way_ , she thinks fleetingly, _there’s no way_ , with the shocking gentleness of his hand against the back of her head, as if he has to remind himself that she’s real, and _here_ , and _she_ kissed _him_. And there’s a give and take to this moment that she’s never quite experienced before; she doesn’t feel as if she’s an emptiness that exists merely to be filled by his expectations of her, rather he is overwhelmed by what she _is_ , and all she can think is that if this indeed _is_ yet another one of Pan’s deceptions, that she would gladly be tricked, again, and again; would gladly let the hands of the clock move slower and slower until they stop, and she can feel the scruff of his face, rough and inviting, against her lips forever.

…

She knows that the clock has to start ticking again. There’s a heaviness to the hands of time that starts to ring in her head, and despite the slight loss of balance in the aftermath of their kiss, she feels steadier. His forehead rests wearily against her own, and it takes an extraordinary amount of effort to keep her lips from returning to their place against his rum-soaked mouth. She’s afraid to open her eyes, because she suspects that the mere sight of his long, thick eyelashes resting against the flushed apples of his cheeks would be her undoing.

When time resumes, this will have to mean nothing; an unfinished sketched in the pages of her memory. Hidden away, labeled “TOP SECRET,” where no one can discover this speciality that she didn’t think she would ever find. This moment in which simply being _herself_ was more than enough for somebody else. No exceptional talent required.

“That was,” he whispers against her mouth, and she feels a desperate tugging in her heart that yearns to hear the end of that sentence, but the traitorous, practical part of her doesn’t let him finish. Silently urges the beat, beat, beat in his own chest to keep it tucked away in the pages of his very real, very heady notebook full of various implications and complexities that she can’t bring herself to consider any longer than she already has.

She asks that he not follow, and for all his talk of being a “scoundrel,” he’s remarkably obedient. A quiet, “As you wish,” at her back follows her all the way back to the campsite; it follows his every action even when he remains blessedly silent, and when they finally rescue Henry and return to the Jolly Roger it follows her down into his cabin, where his notebook has suddenly, remarkably, disappeared.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, please consider following my writing blog [@hencethebravery](http://hencethebravery.tumblr.com)!


End file.
